Songs Without Words (12 page)

11

S
arabeth had made a rule for herself that she would never drive down Billy’s street, and she’d followed it to the spirit if not quite to the letter: she’d driven by only twice since the breakup, once just a week or two afterward, on an afternoon when she knew he’d be teaching; and once at five o’clock in the morning, when no one in his family could possibly be awake. On this Friday evening, though, two days after her dinner with Liz, she happened to be in Rockridge, just blocks from his house, and she felt such a strong pull in that direction that it alarmed her. She imagined stopping out front, cutting the engine, getting out. She’d lean against her car and look: at the handsome craftsman styling; the wide, deep porch; the long driveway back to the garage in which were kept, she knew, the family’s four bicycles, hung on a wall rack that Billy himself had built.

She remembered the look Liz had given her across the table Wednesday night when the subject of Billy came up. A look that seemed to say:
I know.
Liz knew, and somehow that allowed Sarabeth to keep driving.

She was on her way to a read-through of a play written by her book-group friend Miranda, and while she’d envisioned a borrowed house with a large living room, what she found instead was an elegant concrete cube, fronted by a beautifully landscaped garden illuminated by carefully placed yard lights.
TEATRO MIO
, said a discreet plaque on the front door.

Teatro Mio. My theater?

Billy had been an actor when he was younger; he’d liked to quote Shakespeare to her, lines from the romances as they lay in bed together, Henry V’s battle cry as he returned from the bathroom and stood naked in the doorway: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” This on an occasion when he had to head back to campus for a department meeting. She recalled his ironic smile, the way he stood naked in the doorway, entirely unselfconscious. He was generally naked the entire time he was at her house; she’d never been with someone so comfortable with his body.

Nina was already in the lobby, standing with the two Karens—doctor Karen and dentist Karen, as Sarabeth thought of them, even though she’d known doctor Karen—Karen Grimes—for twenty-five years, since long before she was a doctor or needed to be distinguished from any other Karen.

She hugged each of them, tried to bring herself to them, but all of her leaned toward Billy. They were talking, and she let herself go, to his strong arms, his whispering voice….

“Sarabeth,” Nina said. “Weren’t you thinking about getting tickets?”

“Tickets?”

“Hello? To go hear the Nigerian guy?”

Sarabeth had a vague memory of a talk Nina had mentioned, but she couldn’t remember anything else. “I guess maybe I was,” she said. “But I never did.”

It was warm in the lobby. There were twenty-five or thirty people milling around, and she eyed the door, wondered if she had time to go outside for some air. “Hang on,” she said to the group, but as she edged away from them a bell rang, and she turned and saw that Miranda had appeared.

Miranda was one of the quieter members of the book group, and she generally dressed to match her personality, but tonight she wore a sapphire-blue silk dress, and her honey-colored hair was piled on top of her head. What was this going to be like? Sarabeth didn’t know Miranda very well, had not understood until this moment how much must be at stake for her.

Miranda climbed onto a chair and rang the bell again, and when the crowd fell silent she smiled and said, “Please join us.”

The theater consisted of four rows of steeply banked seats in front of a bare stage. Sarabeth followed Nina in and sat down. What
was
this going to be like? The whole thing had started with
The Hours,
which the book group had read and unanimously loved back in the late nineties, and then loved again when the movie came out.

“I kept wanting them to meet each other,” someone had said as they sat together afterward, in a café near the theater.

“I know,” someone else said. “Actually, I wanted Virginia Woolf to meet Mrs. Dalloway.”

“Mrs. Dalloway? You mean the modern-day Clarissa?”

“No, Mrs. Dalloway the character.”

“But Mrs. Dalloway wasn’t even in it.”

Miranda had taken the bait. A museum administrator, she was finally curating her own show, hanging not paintings but people in the hopes of making a meaningful convergence. Writers meeting their own characters; that was the task she had assigned herself.

When everyone was settled, a man came out onto the stage, dressed in a dark suit and carrying a script. Focus, Sarabeth thought as he began to speak, but into her mind came a picture of Billy reading stories to his boys, or washing dishes while She read the stories, and she couldn’t focus. What is he doing right now? What, right now? This was a game she had played with herself—against herself—throughout the affair. She would imagine him shooting baskets with the boys, standing in front of a classroom of students, practicing tai chi with his Sunday morning group, and anywhere he might be, no matter how unlikely it was that his wife would be with him, Sarabeth imagined Her too, penetrating some fourth wall to stare back at Sarabeth.

He never said he was going to leave her, and that was not the issue; Sarabeth did not expect him to leave her. The issue was, she was sad.
I love you,
he would say,
I love you, I love you,
and she knew it absolutely: they were a great couple, someone might have thought who saw them only through a keyhole, with 99 percent of the picture hidden. When he was with her he was fully with her. She wanted to have dinner with him at a restaurant? No problem, he said, and they met for dinner at a restaurant in the city, no big deal. She wanted to have a whole night together? No problem, his wife was taking the boys to LA, and he stayed all night three nights in a row and woke her with kisses on her shoulder each morning. Nothing she wanted was impossible, except all she really wanted: total ownership.
We’re here for such a short time,
he said to that—meaning on earth, meaning in this state of being alive. This was his way of telling her not to be greedy, not to long for something you couldn’t have when what you did have was so nice. But she was greedy.

“Greedy?” Liz had said. “It seems pretty normal to me.”

Up on stage, the man in the dark suit had been joined by a second man in a dark suit. The first man had been talking for quite some time, and while Sarabeth had missed most of it, she had an impression of confusion. From
Mrs. Dalloway
she remembered insane Septimus Smith sitting on a park bench and thinking he heard an important communication in the roar of an airplane passing overhead. The idea of hearing something unreal had always terrified her.

“It shall be the end of me,” said the second man angrily.

“They said they would come,” said the first man. “I believe they will come.”

And two more people did come, another man in a dark suit and a woman in a long, droopy dress and spinster shoes. Virginia Woolf at last. Stones in her pockets, madness…As a child, Sarabeth had thought “madness” was a word for unmerciful rage.

You can’t even get mad,
Billy had said, toward the end.
Has it occurred to you that you’re angry at me?

They were in an unpleasant therapy-speakish few months, where, as at the beginning, they had to have sex as soon as Billy arrived at her house—now because if they waited they’d devolve into weepiness and cajoling. Shortly before the end, he showed up late one Wednesday night and said in a tone of the deepest misery:
I can’t do this anymore.
He didn’t mean cheat on his wife; he meant tolerate Sarabeth’s unhappiness.

“We
are
you,” Virginia Woolf was saying to one of the dark-suited men.

Sarabeth had to leave. She caught Nina’s eye and tapped her forehead by way of explanation, then half stood and sidestepped past dentist Karen.

Losing Billy had ruined her. Or maybe it was being with him that had ruined her. Why had it happened? Why had she had coffee with an obviously married man? Why had she sat on the curb in front of the Berkeley Bowl with an obviously married man? Why had an obviously married man talked to her at the heirloom tomatoes?

Because you were so pretty,
he said once.
And you looked so sad. I wanted to make you laugh.

In her car, five blocks from his house, Sarabeth cried. Sad won him and sad lost him, and through it all time passed. She was on the down-slide to fifty, and she was alone, alone. What had been happening, up on the stage? What had Miranda been saying?
We
are
you.
Flaubert had said it first, but maybe it bore repeating. Mad Septimus Smith and all the characters in all of literature, Anna, Levin, Vronsky: they
were
their makers, painful parts of their makers. Made to bear too much, but known.

Across the bay was Liz, who truly knew Sarabeth. Thanksgiving was six days away. Sarabeth’s own makers were long gone, and whether or not they had ever known her was a moot question because they didn’t know her now: her mother had been dead and gone for decades, her father dead for years and long gone before that. Gone, too, was her lover, the love of her life, and oh, she had loved him so, his kindness, his focus, his lightness—maybe his lightness most of all, the way his self, mind, soul, essence, whatever could move about so easily, his body moving easily through her house, not as if entitled but as if free, that was it, he was so free. So much was gone, but still Sarabeth had Liz.

The weekend crept by. She called Liz a few times, but there was no answer, and she didn’t have the heart, or maybe the energy, to leave a message. She canceled a Saturday afternoon shopping date with Jim and Donald and instead moped around the house. She wished she were the type of person who could rent a slew of movies, or eat massive amounts of sugar, or take soothing aromatherapy baths when she was unhappy, but it seemed she could only feel unhappy, one minute at a time. Billy, and her loss of him. It was so hard to find someone you actually liked, someone you loved: Why had she let it go? Why hadn’t she tried harder? She had suggested this to him, one of their last times together—
I could try harder
—and it was the one time she saw him cry. He cried like a man, just the liquid eyes and nothing else.

Sunday morning she almost threw it off. She woke to rain, the
thip, thip, thip
of it as it hit the ground outside her bedroom window, and she burrowed under her covers and for a moment thought that to fall back asleep on a Sunday morning in late autumn when it was raining was a minor pleasure of a certain, specific order, like the pleasure of the first bare-legged day of spring, when you’d just shaved your legs, or the pleasure of a spoonful of peach sorbet at the height of summer.

Peach sorbet reminded her of Billy, though, and she couldn’t get back to sleep. She stayed in bed for another hour and a half and then got up and crept into the kitchen, to the miniature but somehow engulfing work of making tea.

It was during phases like this that the disrepair of her house most bothered her. In the late morning she spent a despairing half hour contemplating the horror that was her bathroom—not just the water-ruined windowsill in the shower but also the filthy radiator and the bug-filled light fixture and the incredibly ugly aqua tiles, any number of which were chipped. She could distinguish between the radiator and the light fixture (both of which could be cleaned, theoretically) and the windowsill and the tiles (neither of which could be repaired without a great deal of money and trouble), but she was powerless to take on either kind of problem.

All afternoon she avoided her living room window so as not to have to see the lit-up inside of the Heidts’ house and their Sunday company. Toward dusk she returned to the bathroom and ran water for a bath. While the tub filled, she fingered the abalone shell that rested on the glass shelf above her sink. Billy had brought it to her from Tahiti; its color was the shimmery blue-green of the ocean when the sun was low. Their reunion after that trip had marked what was in retrospect the beginning of the end. He’d had a glorious time. The boys had spent hours every day in the water and had come back with their dark hair blond and their pale skin deeply tanned. To Sarabeth it was excruciating.

She began to undress, and the phone rang. She stepped out of the bathroom and looked at her answering machine. She knew she needed to get outside herself, but how, when it was she who was keeping herself in? Nina had called three times, but she hadn’t answered, hadn’t responded to the increasing concern in Nina’s solicitous messages; and the apologetic e-mail she’d sent Miranda had brought a concerned call to which she had not responded either.

Her outgoing message finished playing, and the answering machine beeped.

“Uh, Sarabeth,” said a man’s voice. “Liz wanted me to call you because, uh, this is Brody, Brody Mackay, and Liz wanted me to call you because something’s happened, and—” He sighed, and, staring at the phone, Sarabeth trembled.

“Lauren tried to hurt herself. She did hurt herself. She’s in the hospital, and Liz wanted me to let you know. Thanks, bye.”

Something was terribly wrong in the physical world—it was as if Sarabeth’s house had turned sideways. She reached for a chair and sank onto it.
Lauren tried to hurt herself, she did hurt herself.
What did that mean? It had to mean what she thought it meant, but it couldn’t mean what she thought it meant, because that couldn’t have happened. Sarabeth’s heartbeat was crazy—it wasn’t so much fast as incredibly loud. Lauren couldn’t have done that. Done what, though? She didn’t know what Lauren had done. She needed to call and ask.

But:
Liz wanted me to let you know.

Why hadn’t Liz called? The house turned sideways again, and Sarabeth ran into her bedroom and dove onto the bed. She put her fist to her mouth and gnawed at her knuckles and sobbed. She had to go to Liz right now, but she didn’t know if she could.

She had to, though. She kicked off her sweatpants and pulled on jeans. If she was going to drive across the bay she needed to eat, and she ran (why was she running?) into the kitchen and grabbed a bag of rice cakes. At the front door, though, she stopped, overtaken by dread. In seconds she was back on her bed.